I just listened to the sermon preached by Nadia Bolz-Weber at the funeral service for Rachel Held Evans. It is powerful, moving, authentic, faithful, hopeful, and, above all, full of glory, the glory of God’s gracious love … for us. It is in receiving and embodying and witnessing to this love that we are most human, most ourselves. This sermon is very much worth a listen. You may find the link to the funeral service here. The sermon begins at about 50:20 and ends at 1:03:50.
Sermon preached May 12 at the Deer Isle/Sunset Congregational Church, UCC …
Oh, my! That’s what I said to myself when I saw that this was the lectionary text for this Sunday. Oh, my!
Peter said, “Get up,” to the dead woman … and she did.
Oh, my! What are we going to do with this?
There are two rather easy things to do with this, two things that a lot of us do with this. For some Christians, this story and others like it are proof positive that we too should have, and actually do have, the power to work miracles if we would only use it. The only reason, they suggest, that we do not see more miracles ourselves is that we do not ask. Whatever we ask, whatever we command, in Jesus’ name, shall be done. If we had enough faith, we too could heal the sick and raise the dead.
If we had enough faith. If I had enough faith.
So does that mean that if I pray for my sick friend and she only gets worse, or if I pray for God to heal my dying neighbor and then he dies, does that mean that I didn’t have enough faith? That I didn’t pray in the right way? That I am somehow spiritually deficient?
No! Absolutely not! That’s the problem with this all too simplistic reading of the story. It puts the focus on me — my adequacy, my strength, my spiritual acumen — instead of on God, on God’s goodness and God’s grace. It becomes more about manipulating God to do what I want than about trusting myself and those I love to God’s powerful love and God’s gracious intent.
And the tragedy is, rather than bringing comfort to a grieving spouse or child or friend, putting this unrealistic expectation onto them only adds guilt and shame on top of the unbearable pain that is already there. Now not only is the one they love dying, but it is somehow their own fault because if they had enough faith, they could save them.
People get sick and people die, not because either they or we failed, not because either they or we lacked faith, but because it is a fact of our existence. God is not cruelly waiting and watching to see if we will say the right words in the right way with enough belief, but instead God is sharing our grief, bearing our pain, coming to where we are, coming to be with us in the valley of the shadow of death.
The second all too easy response to this story is simply to dismiss it altogether as an elaboration, an embellishment, a fable told to bolster the apostles’ reputations. It just didn’t happen, because it can’t happen.
It can’t? The God in whom I put my trust and my hope raised Jesus Christ from death! The God in whom I put my trust and my hope spoke the worlds into existence and gave me life! All that we are and all we have and all that we will be is gift, God’s gift. Would you want to put your faith in a God incapable of bringing life out of death, a God incapable of bringing anything to life, a God powerless to do or change anything?
No, it’s not about magic or spiritual prestidigitation, but it is about miracle, about the miracle of life that is and life that will be, the miracle that there is life at all, that there is a world at all, the miracle that you and I are here today living and breathing, capable of knowing and loving each other, capable of knowing and loving the God who made us, capable of living in this world with purpose and with faithfulness and with hope.
No, I don’t like either of these two easy answers. But what if, rather than rushing to judge this story with our own preconceived assumptions and biases, we let the story speak for itself? What is its meaning, its purpose, in its own context? Why is it included as part of the gospel record?
The story of raising Dorcas is intended to be a sign, a sign that Peter’s message about Jesus — Jesus the healer, Jesus our resurrected savior — is real. It is a sign that what Peter is saying and doing comes from God, just as what Jesus said and did came from God.
You may know that Acts is actually part II of a longer book. Part I is the gospel of Luke. Part I, Luke’s gospel, tells Jesus’ story, the story of the one sent by God to “proclaim good news to the poor” and to announce “that the time has come for God to save his people.” Luke’s Jesus tells stories of God seeking out lost ones, ones overlooked and discounted by everybody else, and Luke’s Jesus himself seeks out such ones, welcoming them and healing them and saving them.
Part II of the book, Acts, tells the stories of Jesus’ followers as they continue his mission of welcoming and healing and forgiving and saving. Jesus is still alive, still at work, in them.
The story in Acts of Peter raising Dorcas echoes the story in Luke of Jesus raising the son of a widow. When people saw Jesus raise the widow’s son, they exclaimed: “A great prophet has appeared among us! God has come to save his people!” The miracle is a sign, a sign to them that God has come near, a sign that God is on the move. In the same way, raising Dorcas is a sign, not just to those who witnessed it, but to the readers of Acts and now also to us, a sign that God has come near, that God is still on the move in and among us.
But it’s more than that. Raising Dorcas is not just about Peter, not just a sign that God is with him. It’s about Dorcas, a sign that her life matters. Her life, this life, matters. The ministry of Peter and the other apostles, just like the ministry of Jesus, reveals God’s investment in our lives as they, in we human beings as we are, made in God’s image, but also made of earth, of dust, of ground.
This life matters! This body matters! Why else would Jesus give sight to blind people or heal lame people or feed hungry people? Just to show off? It’s about bringing life, fullness of life, to all God’s creatures, to all God’s dear ones. God desires shalom for us, for all of us: wholeness of life, fullness of life, goodness of life, here and now.
Peter is a sign of what God is up to, but so is Dorcas. Dorcas is a sign! Dorcas is a wonder! “She spent all her time doing good and helping the poor.” She was busy, all the time, doing God’s work, making shalom, loving widows by clothing their bodies, making the lives of people at risk better. She didn’t urge them to wait and pray for the life to come; she did all she could to make their lives better here and now.
Peter saw that. He saw the widows’ grief, saw the shirts and coats Dorcas had made for them, and he felt pity, pity for their loss of the one who cared for them, just as Jesus felt pity for the widow who lost her sole means of support when her son died. Raising Dorcas is a sign that her life and her ministry matter to God. Raising Dorcas is a sign that the lives of the widows who depended on her matter to God. And raising Dorcas is a sign that the power of resurrection is at work here and now among us.
The power of resurrection is at work. Do you see it? Resurrection is not some guarantee of a future life some day somewhere else. Resurrection is a sign of God’s investment in this life, here and now, of God working to heal, redeem, reconcile, lift up, make right, make better, bring life here and now.
I don’t get excited about heaven. I get excited about resurrection, about believing that God can bring dead things to life, that God can bring the dead things in me to life, that God can bring to life the dead things in this world — people and nations divided against each other, people without food, people without purpose, people without love.
This is our hope: that one day God will make all things new. And this is our hope, too: that that work has already begun.
Dorcas was a sign, a sign of the power of resurrection at work, and my mother was a sign. I am remembering my mother on this Mother’s Day. She died not quite a year ago, on May 21, in Iowa. Last July, we held a memorial service at St. Francis by the Sea Episcopal Church in Blue Hill, her church, and afterwards my sister and brother and I along with members of our families spread her ashes on Blue Hill Bay just as we had my father’s ashes seventeen years before.
My mother was a wonder. She didn’t make clothes, she made music. For many years, she served as a church choir director. I sang for her, in a high school youth choir, and later as a young adult.
She was a competent, well-trained musician, but for her, and for us because of her, music was about passion, about connecting both singers and congregation to the meaning and emotion of the music. Music was a means of proclaiming the gospel and a means of embodying the gospel, embodying (quite literally expressing with our bodies!) the joy and hope and wonder of the gospel. We sang for her, not just with our voices, but with our whole selves, because we understood from her that we were not singing for her, but for God.
My mother was a wonder and a sign. She was raised in a very conservative Christian and Missionary Alliance church, taught a faith focussed mostly on don’t’s: don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t gamble, don’t dance, don’t go to movies, don’t play cards … you get the drift! She married my father, himself raised in a family of non-church-goers, but whose faith in Jesus was birthed through the campus ministry of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship while he was an undergraduate at Michigan State University. During their life together, they were members of a whole variety of churches — Presbyterian and Baptist, independent and Congregational, finally settling down in the Episcopal Church.
They moved from what would be commonly labeled an “evangelical” expression of faith to a more “progressive” expression of faith, but labels do not tell their story, cannot tell their story. Their faith didn’t change, rather it grew. They never abandoned the fire of their first love, the evangelical fire of love for God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength,. They simply came to understand in new ways, deeper ways, wider ways, the implications of that love and of God’s call to love their neighbors as God loves their neighbors, all of them, each of them. Faith for my mother and my father was always about righteousness and justice and love, but as their faith grew, it became more and more and more about grace.
Mom was raised a Nixon/Goldwater Republican, but her faith and what she saw through the eyes of her faith changed her. She saw prejudice and discrimination and white privilege. She saw abuse of power and disregard for the “other” and disregard for the earth and she became a civil rights activist and an environmental activist and a strong defender of her lesbian daughter.
My mother was a wonder and a sign, a sign that the power of resurrection is at work among us, changing our minds, changing our hearts, bringing to life the dead things in us, leading us from a life of “don’t’s” to a life of “do’s,” calling us into a life that brings life, a life not of judgment, but of blessing.
Dorcas was a wonder. My mother was a wonder. And you are a wonder.
You are! You are a wonder — God’s breath, God’s spirit, is manifested in you as in no other. You are a wonder and you are called to be a sign, a sign that the power of resurrection is at work among us. Your words can heal. Your touch can heal. Your service can heal. You are called to sing and to dance, to love and to serve, to feed and to clothe, to make justice and to make peace, and by all of it to show that God is near, that God is up to something, that God is still in the business of bringing things, bringing people, to life …
Sermon preached Palm Sunday at the Deer Isle/Sunset Congregational Church, UCC …
We stand at the head of Holy Week, a week that begins with hosannas of Palm Sunday and ends with the hallelujahs of Easter, a journey from joy to joy.
But it is not an easy journey. We get from here to there, we can only get from here to there, by way of Maundy Thursday, by way of the shock and betrayal and abandonment of Maundy Thursday. And we get from here to there, we can only get from here to there, by way of the horror and darkness and emptiness of Good Friday. The journey from life to life is not an easy one, for Jesus or for us.
But today is Palm Sunday, the head of the week, a most enigmatic day. It’s a day filled with excitement, but also an undercurrent of foreboding. The crowds joyfully welcome the one they call king, but he choses deliberately to enter the city riding humbly on a donkey’s colt. They are loud and effusive, he is quiet and subdued. Palm Sunday is a day filled with contradictions. Palm Sunday is a day filled with irony.
The parade wasn’t planned. Jesus‘ disciples procured the donkey’s colt at his request, but they didn’t recruit the crowds. It just happened. The people just came, flocking to Jesus as he rode toward the city. John’s gospel says they came because of Lazarus, because they had seen that startling miracle or had heard tell of it. Luke simply says they came because of “all the great things that they had seen.”
All the great things. They had seen enough, they had heard enough. Enough to believe. Enough to believe that this man came to them from God, came from God for them. Enough to believe that the time was near when they would be saved, when their nation would be restored at last, when their dignity would be given back to them, when their disgrace as a people would be lifted from them, when the Lord would set them free again just as he once brought their ancestors out of slavery in Egypt. The crowd of disciples saw the edge of the promise. They were filled with hope, believing that the moment had come at last when everything would be changed.
I remember a November night eleven years ago when 240,000 people gathered in Grant Park in Chicago to celebrate a victory and welcome a new leader promising hope and promising change. I remember the images, the images of the faces, dark faces, African-American faces, tears streaming down their faces. Regardless of what this man would or would not accomplish in office, regardless of what this man did or did not accomplish in office, for a whole race of people that night was a watershed moment. The way things always had been wasn’t anymore. It was a day of new possibilities, for black people, but also for all Americans. It was a day of a new reality, when things would never be the same again. It was a day of promise.
That’s the way Jesus’ followers felt that day as they watched him ride toward the city. The way things always had been, the way things seemed to have to be, didn’t have to be anymore. Things would never be the same. They saw the edge of the promise, because Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. “God bless the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory to God!”
But Jesus gave no speeches and if he acknowledged the cheering crowds, the gospel writers don’t report it. Mark’s gospel says merely that Jesus entered the city, “went into the Temple, and looked around at everything.” Jesus is quiet, subdued, introspective. He surely believes the promise as much as they do, but he knows far better than they do what it will take to deliver on that promise.
It is a day of irony, Jesus surrounded by adoring people, but never more alone.
The city Jesus entered was Jerusalem, the city of David, the holy city, the city built on a hill, the city intended by God’s call to be a light to the world, the city, the prophets say, to which all nations will come seeking justice and righteousness and peace. Jerusalem is meant to be a place of living witness to a living God, to a living God of mercy, slow to anger and full of constant love, a God whose desire and whose way is nothing less than joy for all God’s people, joy for all creation.
That is what Jerusalem was meant to be. But there were moneychangers in the Temple and whitewashed sepulchers in the pulpits. Justice and mercy were set aside for ritual and legalism. There were no more prophets, only priests, priests and rabbis dedicated not to transformation, but to preservation, preserving the tradition, preserving their livelihoods, preserving themselves.
In Jerusalem, God was not still speaking, or at least God’s people had long stopped listening. In Jerusalem, God was not still doing. Oh, yes, they prayed for the peace of Jerusalem, but they didn’t actually expect God to do anything. They took up the slack where God left off by doing their best to keep things quiet and under control. They did their best to keep themselves safe by not posing any kind of threat to Rome.
It’s was Rome’s light, Rome’s way, the way of power and wealth and empire, that filled their hearts and minds, not God’s way, the way of humility and sacrifice and love. Jerusalem, the holy city, the city meant to be a place of living witness to the living God, instead silences God’s witnesses and kills God’s prophets. And Jerusalem killed Jesus.
Friends, do not miss the irony. May we not substitute self-preservation for justice. May we not care more about personal security than love. May we not turn a living, breathing, ever-changing, ever-growing faith into some kind of frozen relic, some kind of pacifier to soothe us in the midst of a daunting world. The church is not meant to be a place to which we come for safe retreat from the world, but a place from which we are sent out to love God by changing the world, changing the world by loving our neighbors, all our neighbors, in real and risky ways.
We are called together here, not to protect and preserve the way of life we already have, but to be living witnesses to the way of life that will be when God’s kingdom comes, when God’s will is done.
They didn’t see it — the Pharisees. They told Jesus to order his disciples to be quiet. They didn’t see hope, they saw disturbing the peace. They didn’t the edge of the promise, they saw a looming threat. They didn’t see a message or a messenger from God, they saw impudence, heresy, blasphemy. They didn’t see the kairos, the moment on which the course of history itself hung in the balance.
Jesus answered: “I tell you that if they keep quiet, the stones themselves will start shouting.” Friends, this is not hyperbole! This is not a metaphor! Jesus means what he says. He means the stones themselves will start shouting!
Because all of creation waits with eager longing for God to set it free from its slavery to decay! All of creation groans with pain, like the pain of childbirth. All of creation is on alert waiting for God to come. Isn’t it?
But they don’t see it. They don’t see what is at stake here. The fate of humanity, the fate of the world, the fate of God’s promise, their own fate is at stake. They think this is about one pesky rabbi whose popularity has gotten a little bit out of control. It is a day of irony.
There is one more irony. On this day when the future of humanity hangs in the balance, on this day when our own future hangs in the balance, there is nothing we can do. Later there will be much we can do. Later there will be much we must do. But on this day, there is nothing we can do.
We cannot go where Jesus goes. We cannot do what Jesus does. We cannot walk the path of obedience all the way to death and we cannot die to take away the sins of the world, let alone our own sins. We cannot fulfill the promise.
But Jesus can and Jesus will. Jesus will fulfill the promise. Jesus will walk the path of obedience all the way to death. Jesus will die, innocently executed, because of jealousy, because of fear, because of shame, because of despair. And in dying he will swallow up jealousy in humility. He will swallow up fear in love. He will swallow up shame in forgiveness. And he will swallow up despair in a hope that does not disappoint. Jesus will die … for us, for all of us, for the world.
That is gospel. That is good news.
The purpose of this week is to remind us of gospel, to remind us that the heart of our faith is grace, not what we must do to please God, but what God has done for us out of God’s own good pleasure. The heart of our faith is love, God’s love, God’s love for us, God’s love for this beautiful and fragile earth, God’s love for all us beautiful and flawed creatures. God comes to us, in Jesus, to set us and all creation free from the laws of sin and death. So we can live! So we can live well! So we can live well and be well and make well!
May the Lord be with you, may the Lord be with me, as we make the journey this week from life to life.
I was recently invited to join the members of the TheOOZE Viral Blogger Network. You can learn more about the Ooze online community by following the link listed in my blog’s Links list. Each month, Ooze viral bloggers select from a list of books of interest to Christian thinkers and pilgrims and agree to submit reviews on their own blogs and on the Ooze website. For my first review, I chose, and read in a hour, a new book by Brennan Manning, entitled, the furious longing of God.
Exactly at the midpoint of Brennan Manning’s book come these words:
Until the love of God that knows no boundary, limit, or breaking point is internalized through personal decision; until the furious longing of God seizes the imagination; until the heart is conjoined to the mind through sheer grace, nothing happens.
Nothing happens. Nothing that matters happens in you. Nothing that matters happens through you. Nothing happens to transform you, to heal you, to wake you up to the dawn of the life God has in store for you.
Brennan Manning wants something to happen. Brennan Manning wants something to happen for you. And so he pulls out all the stops — emotional, rhetorical, poetic — to push you and prod you and upset you and compel you to open your eyes and heart and soul to see the love, the real and powerful and vibrant and furiously intense love, God has for you.
But that’s not quite right. It is God that wants something to happen in you! Brennan is merely trying to serve as the messenger, to point, to reveal, to pull back the curtain, to try to express what cannot be rightly expressed, but to hint at it poignantly enough to bring us to look for ourselves.
If the book has a fault, it is that sometimes Manning’s “cuteness,” his toying with language to try to stretch it to say what cannot be said, his use of stories about himself which are mostly rather unflattering, sometimes get in the way and may be distracting, making us think about him instead of the One to whom he points.
And, yet, I cannot really fault him for the way he has done the book. You can’t get at personal relationship impersonally. You cannot hint at, point at, the transforming love of God by being scholarly. You have to get personal. You have to be, not just the teacher, but the messenger, the one who can say, “Can you see what I see?”
The book is not scholarly, not an essay or a treatise, but more a collection of reflections and meditations and prayers and poems. I did appreciate, however, Manning’s frequent use of quotations from other authors, from other Christians, from other pilgrims. One of my favorites was this ironic observation from Gerald May:
The entire process (of self-development) can be very exciting and entertaining. But the problem is there’s no end to it. The fantasy is that if one heads in the right direction and just works hard enough to learn new things and grows enough and gets actualized, one will be there. None of us is quite certain exactly where there is, but it obviously has something to do with resting.
And then there are the lines from Rich Mullins’ song, The Love of God, one of the sources for the title of Manning’s book:
In the reckless, raging fury
that they call the love of God.
That is the relentless refrain of this book: open yourself to the love of God for you! The essence of our faith is not about what we can do for God, but about what God has done, what God is doing for us. It is a book about God, a book that hopes to lead you, the reader, into God’s embrace, a book that urges you and entices you, not to know about God, but to know God.
It is there, in the embrace of God’s love, that our wounds are healed, and it is there that we may become healers, instruments of God’s peace … which is our intended vocation!
Yesterday, as classes resumed at Virginia Tech, students gathered around a display of thirty-three white prayer flags.
Thirty-three flags … one each for the thirty-three people who died the previous Monday at the hand of a lone gunman. One each for his thirty-two shooting victims … and one for him.
Thirty-three lives were lost. Thirty-three precious human lives were laid waste. All thirty-three people were remembered and grieved. It is a powerful witness that love can rise up over hate, that grace can rise up over bitterness.
Do not let evil defeat you; instead, conquer evil with good.
From a Christian blog I read:
General Peter Pace’s comments calling homosexuals acts as immoral, and Senator Sam Brownback’s comments backing the General up are nothing less than hateful …
Grace is not about an indifferent acceptance of everything, but about an unconditional love for everyone. Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came under fire this week for his characterization of homosexual behavior as “immoral.” The remarks may indeed have been ill-advised and unnecessary, and probably unwise and unloving to pin the “immoral” label on a group of people with a public statement like that. But I would not call the remarks “hateful.”
I would not hesitate to label acts of pride or envy or greed or bias or abuse as immoral, when in facts our churches are full of people who are prideful and envious and greedy and biased and abusive. To say so is not to be hateful, but to witness to the kind of life God desires for all people. The purpose of grace is not to condone but to transform.
All this is to say that well-meaning and humble and faithful Christians disagree about the “immorality” of homosexual acts. Some in good conscience and with love for their neighbors and with a genuine desire to follow Jesus affirm the expression of same-sex love as acceptable in the sight of God. Others in good conscience and with love for their neighbors and with a genuine desire to follow Jesus believe that obedience to God means that the only acceptable expression of sexual intimacy is between a woman and a man in marriage.
The issue is complex and, to state the obvious, is tearing our churches apart. I believe we need a healthy dose of charity and a whole lot of love and patience in dealing with each other as we work this through and try to do our best to follow where Jesus leads. We need to listen to each other, try to understand each other, acknowledge each other’s conclusions, even where we disagree, so that the church and its witness will not be destroyed by disagreement over this issue. To brand someone who disagrees as hateful doesn’t help …
From an editorial by John Buchanan in the February 6, 2007 edition of The Christian Century …
I was representing my denomination on a visit to Croatia, not long after the shooting between Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians had stopped. The Croats are mostly Roman Catholic; the Serbs, Orthodox; and the Bosnians, Muslim. The conflict was about more than religion, but religion added fuel to the fire …
We … met Peter Kuzmic, an American who calls himself a Calvinist Pentecostal and who presides over the Evangelical Theological Seminary is Osijek and also holds a chair in world missions at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Kuzmic has pleaded with American evangelicals to stop using terms like “evangelical crusade” and “Balkan harvest” when they come to the region …
Kuzmic told me about a Serbian businessman named Antol who quit his job to go to work for the Agape Project, a refugee resettlement initiative. Antol’s new job was to bring together money, materials and labor to rebuild Muslim villages that had been destroyed in the war. While reviewing rebuilding plans submitted by a Muslim village chief, Antol noticed that the plans did not include rebuilding the mosques that had been leveled. ‘”Why no mosques?” Antol asked. The chief explained that he knew Antol was a Christian, so he assumed that there would be no help in rebuilding mosques. Antol answered: “We will help you rebuild your mosque because we follow Jesus, who told us to love our neighbors. And he told a story once about a man who stopped beside the road to help a victim whose religion was different from his own.”
Because we follow Jesus!
Marie Roberts is the widow of the man who entered the Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, thirteen days ago, taking ten young girls hostage and eventually killing five before taking his own life. On Friday, she released an open letter to the Amish community through her pastor. The text of her letter follows …
To our Amish friends, neighbors, and local community:
Our family wants each of you to know that we are overwhelmed by the forgiveness, grace, and mercy that you’ve extended to us. Your love for our family has helped to provide the healing we so desperately need. The prayers, flowers, cards, and gifts you’ve given have touched our hearts in a way no words can describe. Your compassion has reached beyond our family, beyond our community, and is changing our world, and for this we sincerely thank you.
Please know that our hearts have been broken by all that has happened. We are filled with sorrow for all of our Amish neighbors whom we have loved and continue to love. We know that there are many hard days ahead for all the families who lost loved ones, and so we will continue to put our hope and trust in God of all comfort, as we all seek to rebuild our lives.